


November 11 1917

by Atropos_lee



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: First Time, M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-31
Updated: 2010-12-31
Packaged: 2017-12-03 19:19:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atropos_lee/pseuds/Atropos_lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mervyn Bunter on leave in London - an unexpected encounter in the fog</p>
            </blockquote>





	November 11 1917

November, 1917

Fog rolled in from the river, a grudging wet fog, dirty brown with the tar and soot of a million chimneys, but welcomed by the citizens of London as sure protection from the Zeppelins which had disturbed their nights for several months in this year of 1917.

The fog seeped under the door of the basement rooms at 39b Brick Lane, and mingled with the steam rising from the washing hung before the sullen fire, the reek of coal gas, ageing linoleum, fried fish, coffee and cabbage from the eating house next door, the smoke of cheap cigarettes, and the heat of cheaper talk, of world revolution, of the soviet future and Zion.

The Corporal, who was known in Brick Lane, and to the police, as Moritz Bunzel brother of Miriam, but had reinvented himself at the recruiting office three years earlier as Mervyn Bunter, was contributing his own share of cigarette smoke and brilliantine to the mix - but not his voice. 

In Bunters mud-lined hole in Flanders he had smoked and dreamed of a peaceful day like this, at home with the companions of his childhood. Now, on the last night of his leave, his sister's apartment was unbearable, the company uncomfortable, the atmosphere that of henna itself.

He knew he made these ardent men and women uncomfortable, in his uniform, hair short and slicked., the very image of a state whose end they plotted, year after year, which imprisoned them, year after year, and stole their youth and health in Pentonville and Holloway.

What surprised him was how very much he resented them in turn, and their enthusiasms. He knew they were brave; David had survived 18 months in a work camp in Wales, returning without teeth, bent and wizened. Miriam had been force-fed in Holloway, and never regained the weight. But neither of them had walked, as he had walked, along roads made slick with blood and fat and viscera, slept neck deep in the filthy water of a shell hole, or taken a shovel to hack off the bony arm of a dead man, thrusting through the mud of trench to clutch at the coats of boys arriving to take his place in hell.

So he mumbled an excuse as early as was acceptable, and walked the streets of the city, collar turned up, from dawn to dusk, East to West, past St Paul's, through Cheapside and Chancery to St Giles, from Covent Garden to St Martins.   
+++++

He stood there on the pavement looking up at a fogged window where a very different life had once almost opened to him. 

On a day colder even than this, an old Pole in a greasy coat had dogged him among the second hand book stalls of St Martin's given him 10 s/and promised 15 more for a day's work. The request to strip the shirt from his back was not unexpected - the steady forensic gaze of the rows of students, running over his back and belly and shoulders - broad even at 14 years - were startling. More so the results, the strokes of crayon, pencil and oil which reduced his body to two dimensions, and expanded its meaning into infinity of angles.

A year of work, sitting for the Slade students in the daylight, for the old man by lamplight, rendered in wax, clay, graphite and finally in bronze. Hours listening the fall of cinders in the stove, stoked cherry red to stop his naked thighs from shaking, listening to the Pole talk of light, and shadow, and shade and mass, as his long fingers slid over the limbs of wax and clay.

The Pole never touched him - but the students did, including him carelessly in their evenings of cocoa and sweet German wine in chipped mugs. He listened as he sat for them, drank with them, fucked on rumbled beds and lumpy sofas, sucking up the images in the books scattered across their crumb strewn floors, pinned to plaster walls, scratched onto faded wallpaper....

A clutch of women students tumbled out of the School, and collided with him on the pavement. Pale under hats, earnest, dosed with the scent of turpentine. One had a streak of cobalt on her cheek. They giggled as they spun past him into the fog, forgetting him as instantly as their predecessors had done. 

He turned and shouldered his way into the anonymous crowd. 

++++++

The Corporal still had the dark exotic looks that attracted attention – on this foggy day the eyes turning towards him seemed glassy, like so many fish on a slab. 

Costers and snobs, servants on their half-day, officers on leave, nannies and nobs and dolly mops, schoolboys, suits, coats, hats, umbrellas, flowing through Charing Cross station–corpse like in the yellow light, a legion of the dead who lacked the decency to lie down and rot. 

He imagined a setting a machine gun emplacement on the steps of the National Gallery, to mow them flat, into the fountains of Trafalgar Square, to stare at the sky while pigeons and seagulls fattened on them...

Then one great final whizz-bang of a shell to fall on them all, rulers, rag pickers and revolutionaries alike, and grind the entire city to muck and ash 

Grass would grow and cover the scab, and the world could start again, afresh.

God, he shuddered, and pulled his coat closer. I need a drink. Or a fuck.

Or better still, find someone who will pay for one and provide the other.

So he turned under Admiralty Arch into St James Park.

Twilight had turned the fog sulphurous yellow. It stung his eyes. Tomorrow at seven he would report to Waterloo, and the slow train back to the coast, and the sea, and then freedom of mud and shellfire.  
.   
He took a moment to roll a cigarette and consider his options. 

Here, on the north side of the Park, bordering the Mall he might hope to fall into conversation with a girl, doused in scent, lingering on her way home. He would offer an arm, take her to the Varieties or a Moving Picture, port and lemon in a Piccadilly snug to loosen her - and when she was pliant enough, he might be permitted to spread out his coat out against the dew, lay her down and touch a breast or chill cunt, in hope she would bring him off.

But, if he were to bear bore south and west, across the lake, towards Birdcage Walk - here - close by the barracks, on this path, here, he knew he would certainly encounter something more furtive, richer, drier, more dangerous - citizens whose tastes ran to cock in battledress.

A clerk in a boiled collar, slipping away for a few hours free of wife and wailing children, a doctor in wool and silk, whose shaking hands occasionally strayed onto the knees of youths in trams, or perhaps a well-fed Grocer, smelling of bacon and coffee, who might take him to some darkened storerooms, and suck him among shadows of hams and biscuit boxes, tea chests and fat bellied jars of ginger. 

He shifted as he walked, to give his cock more play within the harsh wool folds of his trousers, lost himself in thought of the nameless, eyeless dark, dry friction of hands and pricks and arse, in which he might burn away the last hours on English soil.

Or even profit. A trophy snatched from these civilian lives, a pocketbook, a wallet, a box palmed from a mantelpiece, a watch from a bedstead. If they complained, a threat of blackmail kept them quiet - backed up with the sting of a broken nose and the splatter of blood on a starched shirt.

Footsteps approaching on the gravelled path. A man, alone. Outline of cap and coat through the veil of fog. An Officer. He had a few seconds yet to turn aside from the path, into the murk, and pass unseen. 

And yet,

An officer, here, on this path, in this area, in the twilight, loitering, as he was, just the way to attract the right kind of attention. 

Now he knew what he wanted. The greater risk, gamey, richer in taste, but soft too, once peeled of his armour of class and rank and service pistol... 

Before the thought was fully formed, the familiarity of the tubular figure, peculiarity of gait, the flash of a single eye glass, stopped it dead. 

Bloody hell. Not just an officer – that sodding officer. 

The last rags of fog parted between them.  
I'm on leave. I'm not bloody saluting. Not here, not now. He can take it out on me back at bloody Arras. 

The rest of the city was swallowed in silence and smoke, leaving the two men eye to eye in a complicit silence. Moisture dripped from the unseen trees above their heads, waiting for a word, a gesture that would set off a long dance of consequences.

"D'you have a light, Corporal?" 

Slowly the Corporal reached for the petrol lighter Private Wood had made out of a bullet casing, and snapped it into life. He stepped forward, cupping the flame, his hands inches from the suddenly illuminated face, long and mobile. 

"Have one yourself”, said the Captain, extending a silver case, open, between them.

"Don't mind if I do". His broad fingers, so much darker than the long elegant hand holding the case, lingered just a moment longer than necessary.

“On leave?” The affected drawl was too too familiar - but not the spark of hot reflected light on the blue eye., nor was sudden shock of wanting as he watched Tobacco and paper hiss away to heat and ash.

"Last night. Sir." 

"Toddling off across the channel myself in day or two. Plans?"

The Corporal's eye's narrowed. This encounter could go either way. He could go either way. Bunter could step aside from the invitation, Meeting a friend, sir. George Robey is playing the Old Vic, sir. Thought I'd step the river for a look, sir. Good night, sir. He would step backwards into the fog, and in three days time, Church parade at Arras, this meeting would have ceased to be.

He looked for clues in the Captain's carefully blank expression. Not as good at game playing as you think, chum.. Dark shadows under the eyes, a hardness about the corner of the mouth. Bloody hell, you must have been living it up to look worse on leave than in the mud. There was something bleak and ruined and desperate there, and his blood sang with predatory longing.

“Plans, sir? " He stepped closer, close enough to smell tobacco scented breath, sweat and fear. "For tonight?" Close enough, under cover of fog, to lay a finger on the Captain's neck, and feel the pulse below, see it skip close to the ember of the fag end. "Not as yet."

++++

The life model had borrowed charcoal, and sheets of greyish-white butchers' paper, and tried to render in black the images in his head, but all the details of expression and movement which seemed so alive in his imagination died a horrible death on their way to his fingers. They lay inert and mangled on the paper, bulging, crookbacked, dead.

The Pole found him crouched on the studio floor in the dark among the fallen, smutty faced, red eyed, surrounded by crushed charcoal. The old man lit the gas, and collected the sketches one by one, holding them carefully to the light. Then he handed them back.

“It's not what your hands were made to do, my pretty little bruiser. Burn them. Find something else to. ”

He spent the night in a police cell, after rolling a drunk in Old Compton Street and smashing the three windows.

++++

They walked through Green Park, the corporal stalking the Captain, twenty paces behind. Once he thought he missed his quarry in the fog, but coming to the street found the slender figure waiting, always just ahead of him.

If asked, right now, what he wanted most in the world it would be pale, and blonde and frail, and he could not say if the itch in his blood was to fuck, or fight, or hear it beg as he broke the fine bones under his fists. 

Or just, perhaps, to be seen.

They almost collided at the corner of South Audley Street, outside a strangely darkened house.

“My uncle's place. Knocked about a bit I'm afraid - Zeppelins, look like children's toys, but seem to do the business in the demolition line. Front door's jammed.”

"Knocked about" was an understatement. The three story house was cracked from eave to area, eyes blinded, muffled in scaffolding. 

Glass cracked under their feet on the area steps, and the door crunched and complained, but opened onto the darkened scullery. Tradesman's entrance.   
“There should be a candle here somewhere, ah yes , and another. Let's throw some light on the matter, ha!” 

The dim recesses of a vast kitchen swum into view, smelling of dust and soot, stripped bare but for a massive table, piled with books, unwashed plates and empty bottles. A sulky fire barely held onto in the range.

“I'm campin' out in here..." Wyndom's voice trailed away as he turned. 

The Corporal was sitting, unbidden on the kitchen table, his coat open, collar popped. This was his world afterall, the dark, dank cellarage where generations like him swarmed unseen servicing by the glittering legions above, with hands and sweat. The Captain was the visitor here.

"So you know where to find me a drink."

"Ah, yes. Oh course. " The Captain lifted a bottle. "Empty. Ha." But he wasn't looking at the bottle, and his lips seemed dry. 

Slatter leaned back a little, let his, let his thighs fall open, flexed his neck, letting the light fall on his throat.The Captain licked his lips, "I'll ... um - fetch something from the cellar."

For just a moment Bunter wished they could just sit here, across the table, with a bottle, eye to eye. But if they couldn't sit and talk as men when living yards apart, both knee deep in shit and mud, why would they here? 

The house creaked above his head. Plaster dust trickled on the table, a door swung. Perhaps it would fall and bury them both in the ruins, to be dug up centuries later, like the dead of Pompeii, twisted together in the old Pole's books.

The baize covered door creaked as he pushed it open. He found himself in a hallway, surfaces that gleamed in the pool of light, marble, gilt, patches on the silk lined wall where pictures had once hung. 

A ghostly tinkle overhead. He raised the lamp. A crazily hanging chandelier drooped above him, streaks of black where sooty rain had seeped through from rooms above.

He passed under a velvet draped arch, into a vast drawing room and almost dropped the lamp at the sight of his own shattered reflection in fragments of mirror clinging to the frame over the mantelpiece.

Cpl Bunter,. Moritz Bunzl, pickpocket, brawler, lifemodel, tart, son of a tailor, son of a bitch, jew, gentile, trained killer. 

This ruin was what he dreamed of, the shells falling on London, the glitter of the rich swept aside, broken, smashed. This ruin was the goal of his sister's passion, what she and David planned and struggled and starved, a breaking of mirrors right across Europe, so that a New World, could force its way through the cracks, like a mighty weed.

Yet, in that instant he was possessed by a heresy of beauty, which made his head and stomach reel. He burned to turn back the tide of decay, to sweep the marble floor clean of dust and rumble, make the gilt frame glow in firelight, blow the shutters from the blind windows to call in sunlight, pull the egg shell fragments of porcelain together into a vase, fill it with colour. With chrysanthemums, burning bronze, and yellow.

Then he saw the picture.

He could understood why it had been overlooked when others had been saved from the wreck. It was small, no more than eight inches square.

He held up the candle, and the boy looked back. Just a sketch, in oil, on a scrap of board, a few lines sketching out the dipped shoulder, dark curls, full lips, a knowing smile, a falling cup, a drunken promise.

He held his breath in wonder, so intent that he did not hear footsteps behind.

“Startlin', isn't it?”

The Captain was standing in his shirt sleeves, a dusty bottle hanging from the fingers of his left hand, two full glasses held out in his right. 

He took one, careless of the wine slopping over the rim, and asked - “Is it real?" 

The Captain giggled, nervously, and instantly he wanted to snatch the words back, silence the laughter with his fists; that wasn't what he meant to say, what the words meant, but he now he exposed himself forever as a street thug who didn't understand the difference between this private florish of an artist's brush, and a cheap lithograph that might hang in a thousand London parlours, “The Light of the World”, “Dignity and Impudence”, “Bubbles” 

Is it original, he meant to say, but it was too late, and men like him were not expected to ask such questions or know the names of obscure Italian artists long since in their graves,, and what he hated most of all was it was true, he was and would die a tailor's orphan and pickpocket. He bunched his fists, horrified by tears pricking in the corner of his eyes.

But the Captain only looked at him and said, "You tell me.”

Bunter searched the long face for mockery, but there was none, just keen curiosity.   
He turned back to the boy, who still pouted, eyes sparkling, the wine spilling from the rim of his cup. He traced the line of the shoulder, the tender curve of the back "“Here, look here - " and the Captain followed his finger "where the artist has corrected the arm with a second stroke," He recalled the burn in his own muscles as he held the pose, heard Pawel's voice as he sketched, “that must have been painful to hold, the boy has stretched to ease out a cramp, the artist has caught the movement." The artist knew the boy, didn't want to lose this moment.

"I believe that is the first time I have heard enthusiasm in your voice, Corporal. You are a man of unexpected interests. ".

"He - It shouldn't be here - it should be locked away somewhere. Safe."

"Why?" The soft bleak tone surprised him more than any of the other events of the day. "Why should thousands of beautiful lads drown every day in the filthy mud, and he be safe? He can take his chances like the rest of us."

Moritz felt something break in in him. It sounded like the wine glass now exploding on the marble floor, as he reaches forward, and pushes, is pushed, half stumbles to the the broken-backed sofa, the kiss of their mouths so hard their teeth clack.

A fumbling of ecstasy, buckle belt, mouth on his neck and face, cotton tearing, a button flying across the room into oblivion, Hand on cock, thigh, lifted, leg over shoulder, spitting on palm, a moment of hesitation, then a coming home, deep into the the blind embrace of another's body. 

Through the night they lie in the plaster dust and dark, drinking and smoking and fucking and, from time to time, talking, with utter honesty, yet never admitting that they were not strangers before this meeting - because, in the simplest way, until this meeting, they were.

+++++

The air still thundered. The ground still shook.

Wimsey looked over the heads of the men at the forward station - the grey, mud splattered, blood splattered and bent coming back from frontline, the pale, scrubbed and apprehensive lining up to go forward.

He looked for a head of dark curls amongst them, but saw none, and didn't expect to. 

36 hours earlier he had woken under a wool blanket in the basement of a childhood home, blanket, gritty with dust, slick with sweat, and quite alone. The bottle was empty, the glasses washed and upside down on the draining board.

Bunter had gone - and the little oil sketch as well, leaving just another faded patch on the wallpaper. He wondered how and where he would fence it and how much an obscure study by an unfashionable artist would reach in the current market - but knew at once that he would not report the theft. Spoils of war. 

Now Corporal Bunter appeared to have deserted for the third and last time in his army career, and even if he had wanted to, Wimsey couldn't save him from the firing squad if he was caught this time.

The chill dugout reeked of Waverley's pipe-mixture, and somewhere near he could hear the shrill shriek of his batman, Jenkins, brewer of the third worst coffee on the Western Front, raised in protest at some slight to his position. He snagged a bottle of brandy from Waverley's kitbag, and ducked into his own fetid billet, fully intending to drink until he could no longer hear the guns and then fall into a state of unconsciousness resembling sleep.

His narrow bed was already turned down, his uniform laid out on the smoothed grey blanket, his dressing case unpacked on the chest beside it. 

Propped against it was the silver frame that he had carried with him to France three years earlier. Then it held his future, a photograph of the fragile golden girl who he believed he loved. Mutton-headed Barbara, who, while he lay in billets like this, or worse, had said "yes" to the first red-faced civilian who had asked her. 

He had smashed glass and picture 10 days ago, when he came home to find her married and pregnant, the twisted frame tossed back into the truck as trash.

But there it was, still without glass, but now holding a tiny sketch in oil, a dark haired boy, turning to the artist with parted lips and a shared secret 

Bunter had scrawled across it in pencil, an irreverence which thrilled as it horrified:

"Let the little bugger take his chances with the rest of us-"


End file.
